Eric Schmidt

Former executive chairman and CEO of Google

• Born: April 27, 1955
• Place of Birth: Washington, D.C.

Primary Company/Organization: Google

Introduction

Chief executive of Google from 2001 to 2011, Eric Schmidt served as executive chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company, from 2015 to 2018. He has a long history in the computer industry, including work at think tanks Bell Laboratories and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and a long stint at Sun Microsystems, where he was its first software manager.

Early Life

Eric Emerson Schmidt was born on April 27, 1955, in Washington, DC. He attended Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia, before earning his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University (1976) and his master of science degree at the University of California, Berkeley (1979). His thesis work was on the design and implementation of a campus computer network. He completed his education with a PhD, also from Berkeley, in electrical engineering and computer science.

While at Princeton, Schmidt developed the Lex program with Mike Lesk of Bell Labs. A Unix program that generates lexical analyzers, or lexers, Lex became the standard Unix lexical analyzer. Open source versions are now distributed as part of open source Unix variants such as Bell Labs' Plan 9 from Bell Labs. Lex is usually used with a parser generator; Yacc (which stands for “yet another compiler compiler”) was the one commonly in use on Unix systems when Schmidt and Lesk developed Lex.

Life's Work

Schmidt worked for PARC's Computer Science Lab, as well as taking a research position with Bell Labs, before being hired by Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley computer start-up focused mainly on workstations at the time, in 1983. He was its first software manager and eventually became the president of Sun Technology Enterprises. One of the products developed at Sun during Schmidt's time was the Java platform and programming language, originally intended to run web applets but later used mainly server-side. Java has had an enormous impact on the internet, but one of the reasons for Sun's eventual fall and buyout by Oracle (after Schmidt had left) was its failure to monetize the product.

After leaving Sun in 1997, Schmidt became chief executive officer (CEO) of the software company Novell. Based in Provo, Utah, Novell had been founded as a hardware manufacturer in 1979 and in the 1980s had become prosperous selling its network operating system, ShareNet, the popularity of which was boosted by Novell's selling its Ethernet cards as a loss leader. In the 1990s, Novell had transitioned into software products that worked with the Internet as well as local-area networks (office LANs), and Schmidt oversaw much of that transition. The last major product introduced during Schmidt's time was DirXML, which synchronized data across various systems. It later became the core of Novell's product line. Schmidt left Novell in 2001 after it acquired Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP), an acquisition engineered by Jack Messman, founding board member of Novell and CTP's CEO.

Schmidt was recruited by Google and hired in 2001. He became the chairman of the board of directors in March and the CEO in August. Schmidt ran the company jointly with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, focusing mainly on the management of vice presidents and subdivisions. During the ten years Schmidt served as Google's CEO, the company saw vast expansion from one still largely focused on the search engine to one that seemed to offer a service or product for every method of interacting with the Internet (including services, such as Google Docs, that involved the Internet in applications that had previously been offline)—while still offering nearly everything for free and depending on advertising for 99 percent of the company's revenue. Along the way, the company acquired many start-ups and products that either rivaled its own or could be rebranded as part of the Google line.

From 2004 to 2010, Schmidt and the Google founders Brin and Page were paid a base annual salary of $1. Most of Schmidt's wealth—in 2011, Fortune listed him as the 136th richest person in the world—comes from his stock options, while his Google compensation was principally for airplane charters and security. In 2011, he stepped down as CEO (with a departing bonus of $100 million) but continued to serve as executive chairman until 2018. He next served as technical adviser.

In 2008, Schmidt became the chairman of the board of directors of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy think tank based in New York City. New America is home to the National Security Studies Program and several specific-issue programs, as well as the Open Technology Institute, which has worked on developing distributed communications networks and other initiatives.

In 2010, Schmidt cofounded Innovation Endeavors in Palo Alto, California, with Dror Berman. A venture capital company, Innovation Endeavors has funded several dozen businesses, seeking game-changing ventures while supporting a pre-idea search fund. Schmidt is also the founder of TomorrowVentures, founded in 2009, an early-stage venture capital fund with similar goals. TomorrowVentures has invested in a variety of enterprises, including wind power; the for-profit Gifts That Give e-commerce company, which generates revenue for nonprofit companies; mobile social games; and BondFactor, a municipal bond insurance company. Schmidt has also personally invested in companies such as the people-to-people lending marketplace Prosper.com; high-end art buying company Art.sy; online ad company Spongecell; ICON Aircraft; data management start-up WibiData; and DailyWorth, an online personal finance community for women.

Schmidt served on the board of directors of Apple from 2006 to 2009 but resigned because of potential conflicts of interest. He has sat on the board of trustees for Carnegie Mellon University and his alma mater, Princeton. His book How Google Works, cowritten with Jonathan Rosenberg, was published in 2014.

In 2015, Schmidt became the executive chairman of the board of directors of Alphabet Inc., then a newly formed holding company that held Google as a subsidiary. He served in this capacity until 2018, when he stepped down as chair to become a regular board member and technical adviser to Alphabet and Google. Though he did not seek reelection to the board when his term ended in June 2019, he continued to serve as technical adviser until he left Alphabet in February 2020. Before leaving Alphabet, he cowrote Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell (2019) with Rosenberg and Alan Eagle.

During his tenure with Alphabet and Google, Schmidt became an influential artificial intelligence (AI) policy adviser to the federal government. From 2016 to 2020, he chaired the Department of Defense (DOD) Innovation Board, which wrote the agency's ethical principles for AI. In January 2017, then secretary of defense Ashton Carter awarded Schmidt the DOD Medal for Distinguished Public Service for his work on the board. Schmidt also chaired the congressionally chartered National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), which released its 756-page final report in March 2021. In its report, the NSCAI stressed that leadership in AI was a national defense priority and should therefore receive the funding, leadership, talent, hardware, and innovation necessary to remain competitive with AI efforts in China and Russia. After his work with NSCAI concluded, Schmidt and other NSCAI alumni continued their work as the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP).

In 2021, Schmidt began hosting Reimagine with Eric Schmidt, a podcast of his conversations with government, business, and technology leaders. Schmidt and his guests sought to explore solutions to societal challenges and envision a hopeful post-pandemic future. That same year, he published The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, which he coauthored with Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Huttonlocher.

Personal Life and Philanthropy

Schmidt is married to Wendy Schmidt. The couple founded the Schmidt Family Foundation, a charitable foundation concerned with sustainability, especially on the island of Nantucket. They also established the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which focuses on climate change and ocean and marine life studies. After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, when a BP oil rig exploded and dumped thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, Wendy donated the prize purse ($1.4 million total, in three prizes) for the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, offered through the X Prize Foundation, for the best solutions for cleaning up crude oil from ocean water. Schmidt was a campaign adviser for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign and was considered as a candidate for secretary of commerce in Obama's cabinet. He served on Obama's transition advisory board after the election was won and promoted the prioritizing of renewable energy investments in the proposed economic stimulus plan.

The Schmidts' philanthropic endeavors in the 2010s and 2020s include cofounding Schmidt Futures in 2017; dedicating $1 billion to Schmidt Futures in 2019; leading New York governor Andrew Cuomo's coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic resiliency commission with Schmidt Futures in 2020; and funding the SCSP through the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation in 2021.

Bibliography

Edwards, Douglas. I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Boston: Mariner, 2012. Print.

Girard, Bernard. The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management as We Know It. San Francisco: No Starch, 2009. Print.

Kastrenakes, Jacob. "Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Will Leave Alphabet's Board after 18 Years." The Verge, 30 Apr. 2019, www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18524495/google-alphabet-board-eric-schmidt-steps-down-18-years. Accessed 25 Oct. 2019.

Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon, 2011. Print.

Poundstone, William. Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? New York: Little, Brown, 2012. Print.

Schmidt, Eric. "AI, Great Power Competition & National Security." Daedalus, vol. 151, no. 2, 2022. DOI: 10.1162/daed‗a‗01916. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Schmidt, Eric, and Jonathan Rosenberg. How Google Works. New York: Grand Central, 2014. Print.